AND TO ALL A GOOD BITE

One year after a gas leak killed financial director Lisa Dozier and six other employees of Marstan Industries, and one day after Jeff Wheeler, who’d planned to ask Lisa to marry him, publicly accused Marstan head Stanley Franklin of deliberately arranging the leak himself in order to kill his underlings, Franklin is obligingly found shot to death in the doorway of his magisterial home. The police, who find the murder weapon discarded in a plastic bag containing lots of stuff traceable to Jeff, quickly arrest him. His case seems so hopeless that his sister, Carol Hendrickson, appeals to still-not-retired Paterson, New Jersey, defense attorney Andy Carpenter to replace his court-appointed counsel, and Andy agrees both to provide a temporary home for Lisa’s dog, Rufus, whom Jeff rescued from the burning building when he couldn’t reach Lisa, and to represent Jeff in hopes that Rufus’ tenancy will indeed be only temporary. The defense Andy constructs, which begins by looking for reasonable doubt under every possible rock, eventually focuses on an auction Franklin had scheduled for a Nazi-held trove of master paintings only recently discovered and liberated, a collection Franklin plans to sell en masse for a minimum bid of $150 million. With that much money at stake, there’s got to be a connection to the principal’s murder, Andy reasons, and of course he’s right—though working through that connection proves perhaps the least interesting part of Andy’s characteristically insouciant narration of his adventures, falling far behind his appealingly flippant remarks to everyone from grieving widow Margaret Franklin to Bergen County Judge Danielle Eddings.